If you happened to get in an elevator with Jon Sherman this year, here’s how he would pitch you the business he founded in New Orleans and moved to Brooklyn seven years ago: “Flavor Paper is a design-centric wallpaper company hand-screening and digitally printing eco-friendly murals and patterns that will change your world.” It might seem over-the-top to say that wall coverings will transform our lives, but Flavor Paper is definitely making strides to challenge the status quo. Just one example: It’s now possible to cover your entryway in actual scratch-and-sniff wallpaper—yes, like the stickers—and not be worried about it harming your toddler or the water supply, to boot. Here, Sherman chats with us about his favorite innovation so far, the craziest design the company’s ever created, and more.

Architectural Digest: What makes Flavor Paper innovative?

Jon Sherman: We are totally water-based, which is good for the environment inside and outside of your space. We use the highest-quality materials, latest equipment, and work with the brightest designers in the world. All processes are in-house, which allows us to respond to a custom request extremely quickly from concept to creation.

AD: What innovation are you most proud of?

JS: Creating scratch-and-sniff wallpaper that went into the Cooper Hewitt’s permanent collection was pretty rewarding, but I had always considered the idea to be more of a joke; we had no idea that it would take off. The decision to allow customers to choose their ink colors, materials, and pattern to create a bespoke hand-printed wallpaper without any additional cost or lead time way back in 2004 is really the biggest innovation Flavor Paper brought to the table.

AD: What was the inspiration behind some of your more unexpected wallpaper finishes?

JS: We always search out the unusual and are looking for another way to add something unexpected to wallpaper. Holographics was a fun and easy option by just adding a different overlay onto our base ground. Scratch and sniff was our collaborator Michael Angelo’s idea. He wanted to design a paper for us and when he went back to his high school sketchbooks, he found all of these old stickers and asked if we could do it. I did some research, discovered it was possible, even water-based, and the Fruit Cocktail collection was born!

AD: What is the most unusual wallpaper you’ve come up with—even if it wasn’t feasible?

JS: We’ve printed some crazy wallpapers, so hard to say! We tested over 30 types of materials trying to replicate Warhol’s diamond dust, which was really just small shards of glass. We went as far as grinding our own glass shards in a ceramic coffee grinder trying to get to a size and consistency that would work with a screen, but in the end we used a combination of several different cuts, colors, and sizes of glitter so it wouldn’t fall off the wallpaper or cause installation issues like glass beads. I think our craziest wallpaper was for Governor restaurant in Brooklyn’s Dumbo neighborhood, which unfortunately flooded in Hurricane Sandy just weeks after they opened. You can see it on our website—we used an image of Robert Gair, who was called Governor, and placed his head into numerous compromising positions within vintage soft-core porn. We then burned the images onto photographs I’d taken of stacks of corrugated cardboard. It was amazingly fun and wild.

AD: Why the focus on being eco-friendly?

JS: My major was in environmental science with a focus on water law, so for me maintaining the water supply has always been paramount. I didn’t want to start a company that could potentially kill me or my clients, so I made a very early decision to go water-based, having no idea how difficult that would prove to be. I stuck with it, though, and we have made many improvements over the years that have allowed us to perfect the technique; we can achieve colors and effects that cannot be done with solvents. And it won’t harm your baby to have this wallpaper in his or her room, unlike many of our competitors’ products.

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AD: Who do you look up to as an innovator?

JS: I have been absolutely blown away with the creative innovation that is Hamilton. Lin-Manuel Miranda took a classic art form, historic text, and made it into something so fresh and forward that it is bound to change the course of Broadway plays. Even school plays for that matter! Super-inspiring.

AD: How do you encourage your staff to think like innovators?

JS: Nothing is off-limits, so take chances and make something different. The team has come up with ways to print wallpaper I had never known were even possible and those have become my favorites.

AD: What’s next for Flavor Paper?

JS: We are working on something that will change the way you look at your walls, so stay tuned!

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